I saw Bulkhead first, and my immediate mental response was something like "Excuse me?" and I wanted to speak to the manager of Hasbro. Skids looks weirdly like a Cyberverse toy, but decently executed enough within parameters that don't seem to apply to the rest of the line. So when the reveals came along for the others, I was relieved at least that the line hadn't been dumbed down completely and the other figures looked like they'd been designed by someone who'd designed a Transformers toy before. And even Bulkhead does at least look like, well, something I can see someone having plausibly designed with an idea in mind after seeing the side view and that his torso is a cube rather than just a square.
But yeah. Arcee's proportions are all wrong and she looks weird with a nose, but those things will be fine in the Flamewar deco, it doesn't make her an inherently worse toy. They clearly tried, they even gave her the pink trim, but it's a miss for the character, still probably an okay toy, really sexy looking bike. Prime is rocking another version of the Siege legs so I feel like we know what to expect by now, and I have to admit I've never liked the Laser Prime deco, but while he looks a little drab, it's accurate and he doesn't have anything obviously wrong with him.
Drag Strip and Kickback are both very ordinary, like, they could have been from any line, and Drag Strip's spacey alt mode gives me a mix of hope and confusion while Kickback's alt mode is a dude on his stomach. Neither is exactly striking.
So I feel like this wave doesn't really tell me what to expect from the rest of the line and whether to be optimistic or not, because the figures don't actually have an awful lot of design or theme in common. I know that the only one I would actually want is the Flamewar redeco of Arcee that's probably coming since it's featured in IDW2.
So I'm actually back where I started, that the most interesting thing in this reveal is railing about why Bulkhead is a hollow Universe Inferno and what did they ******* do to my beautiful round boy. Because it's a goddamn crime. The length of his legs feels like a cruel joke.